The Crime Chief offers a shield to killers

May 18, 2011 Letters

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Dear Editor,
The Stabroek News headline dated 05/17/2011 and captioned; “Slain EX-BOXER HAD TIES TO DRUGS AND GUNS” – Crime Chief, has again exposed a sorry line of thinking in the upper level of the police force and the government of Guyana.
In the news report, Mr. Seelall Persaud, the Crime Chief commented that ex-boxer Linden Mortley who was, executed a few days ago on the Festival City Bridge, had ties to organized crime.
These crimes, he stated, included; narcotics (specifically narco-trafficking) and firearm trafficking. Mr. Seelall Persaud also said that Mortley was known to the police for more than ten years and was on the GPF radar for those years.
The question for the Crime Chief now should be, given all this supposedly valuable information the police had on Mortley, why were the police unable to capture him? This question invites a number of possible responses but I wish only to refer here to what I believe continues to be the larger or over-arching problem and that is a lack of a comprehensive crime fighting strategy.
For years the Guyana Government has refused to respond positively to calls from the opposition to develop such a strategy. It is hoped that with such a strategy in place the dangerous crime situation would be significantly addressed.
We, as a people, can not accept comments like those spewed by the Crime Chief, as crime solving indicators or tactics. For too long we have been fed with this crafty foolishness every time a vicious crime occurs. Guyanese continue to ask, why every time a citizen is executed the police comes out with a position that the individual was in some way linked to some kind of criminal enterprise?
This is the kind of posture, I believe, that ensures that the criminal enterprise continues unabated, as the executioners, murders and criminals feel encouraged to commit more crimes. The police, in their mind, have offered a good defence for their crime.
With this stated position the police seem to become least interested in pursuing the perpetrators of this wicked act, since for them the man ‘on their radar’ has been eliminated. For them, it might be crime solved, for Guyana another unsolved killing and another gunman/ criminal on the loose.
During the infamous ‘death squad’ reign we heard much of the same ‘Seelall comments’, many citizens were almost bullied into believing that everybody that lay dead on the street was a criminal.
It was not until the notoriously known case of ‘Yohance Douglas and his U.G buddies’ that some us who were quick to judge, began to understand what was going on. Today, the Crime Chief continues to promote this; ‘he was a criminal’ defence stance and it brings back flashes of that not too distant past.
One, therefore, has to wonder if there is a replacement of the death squad. When five, including a four-year-old child, were slain in Cummings Lodge last year, the police told us that it was drug related. When the young man was gunned down in front of his Da Silva Street home late last year the police told us he was a known marijuana dealer.
When last August a man was riddled with bullets, as he stood in front of his Charlestown home, the police told us it was drug related.
Today, there remains no clue as to who were the perpetrators of these vicious murders, and it appears as though the police and the government are least concerned about solving these heinous crimes
What is sad, however, is that there seems to be a lack of understanding as to how the nation, as a whole,
continues to be seriously affected by all of this unsolved crime and mayhem.
I ask us not to accept the ‘PPP/C / Seelall’ explanation of things; we must demand that every effort be made to capture the criminals who continue to create havoc on this nation. Whether Mortley was or was not a criminal is irrelevant. Not pursuing his killer/s is more dangerously criminal and amounts to a devastating indictment on the Ministry of Home Affairs and the Guyana Police Force.
It more than likely espouses an approach which may, ultimately, render the Guyanese people defenseless victims of an unresponsive government; a people made to bear the brunt of the tyranny, which engulfs us, as service and protection seem to take on whole new meanings.
As a people we must demand more from our Crime Chief and government and caution them that recent comments do not augur well for this nation, in any effort to fight crime. We must be reminded of the confessed informant, George Bacchus’s words, when he lamented that he told the authorities that he was concerned that members of the death squad were killing for fun and for mere pay and were killing innocent citizens for a few dollars.
His outrage was that the killing squad had become consumed with killing people, because the members knew that they were protected. I invite Mr. Seelall Perdaud and the PPP/C Government, in particular the Minister of Home Affairs, to reflect, if they can, on the logics of George Bacchus’s argument.
It is simple and straight forward, therefore, claiming that every executed citizen was a criminal is only likely to bolster the agenda of the gunmen out there or cause those in for revenge killings to ratchet up their agenda, to pursue their target.
It may lead to the fashioning and promotion of the ‘killer instinct’ which leaves us all vulnerable. Seelall’s rhetoric also has the larger potential for encouraging and nurturing gun crimes, leaving citizens even more open to violent criminal attacks, as criminals take refuge in the ‘Seelall shield’ ( he was a criminal under police radar).
For those ready to launch an attack on my take here I invite you to take an objective stance on this issue and argue from a position of logic and not from ego. Our mission here must be to seriously and effectively address the spate of criminal violence in Guyana, a people is at risk!
It is time for collective action to stem the tide. Guyana deserves nothing less.
Lurlene Nestor

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